"Taking Care of Things"

"A Warriors animatic I’ve recently finished, about River Ripple and Gray Wing!  I don’t read the  books much anymore, but I liked their interactions enough to make something for it. The music used is the latter part of “Taking Care of Things”, by Cavetown, who makes beautiful songs! For some more commentary, read below the cut.

So Warriors, huh? I used to read tons of it when I was younger, but stopped for several years, and I’ve only just recently started reading it again. I picked up Dawn of the Clans, since it’s completely new to me, and it’s really good! Going through the books, some of my favorite interactions between the characters were the ones between River Ripple (the blue striped cat in this animatic) and Gray Wing (the gray cat not having a good time) – their relationship is really sweet to me, and I just like the fact that River Ripple is kind of the unofficial hippie therapist of the clans. He’s just a genuinely nice dude that wants everybody to hang out on his island and feel better.

As for the animatic itself, it took some time to work out the colors and style I wanted to go with. I decided on three distinct color palettes based on the time of day – one for night, one for evening, and one for morning. I also went with a more simplistic cat style and used hard lines separating colors and shadow instead of blending them more naturally like I normally do, since that made it much easier to color quickly. A smaller detail, but you might also notice those flowers in the background at certain points – those are anemone flowers! In the book, when Turtle Tail (the tortoiseshell cat in the beginning) dies, it’s mentioned that she was covered in petals after falling through wildflower bushes, and I thought that that was an interesting image to work with, so I expanded on that and added the flowers in various scenes to represent suffering. I chose anemone flowers specifically because a source I saw said that they could represent forsaken love, which I think fits, but then various other sites said they meant completely different things, so I dunno. For a final tidbit, here are the designs I first drew up when conceptualizing the animatic! They didn’t change much, but I stuck with a color palette instead of their actual colors and the stripe on River Ripple’s head went missing somewhere along the line.

You know, I honestly never thought this animatic would actually be a thing. It started when I found the song and thought “huh! This would fit this situation pretty well” and then escalated to “well, story-boarding it would be a fun exercise!” and then to “well, the story-board’s done, I might as well just start making complete frames and see where it goes.” And then boom. It was done. Something that I never even thought I’d start. Inspiration is a strange thing."

 - 2018 Brennan